What's Up with Jews and Guilt?

Great Debates
1

I know, I know, major stereotyping here. Obviously, I don’t go around with the notion in my head that the average Jew spends his or her day spouting “oy vey!”, wringing hands neurotically, and kvetching about what mother thinks of them.

Then again, there is that stereotype. The other day my wife and I were yukking it up with a friend, up visiting from Manhattan. Our friend happens to be the gay product of a formerly Catholic mother, and a formerly Orthodox Jewish father. Not a man without familial issues. Anyway, having been raised Catholic myself, I was lamenting some of the indoctrinated guilt we Catholics are compelled to feel on a regular basis while attending CCD and getting confirmed, and my friend was like “Guilt? GUILT? Honey, you don’t know from guilt.” So I asked him, “yeah, what’s up with the whole Jewish guilt thing?” He just shrugged, “I dunno, we’re just full of it…it’s in the blood,” before doing a very hilarious ad lib skit lampooning his father.

The conversation moved on to other topics, and I didn’t feel like broaching the subject again. But it lodged in my head. I understand Catholic guilt pretty well: “Jesus is perfect, and compared to Him, I am utter filth. I am rotten to the core, and to remedy this, I must take the Eucharist and go to Confession every week or I will burn in Hell forever.” It’s so simple, even a little child can understand it. That’s why we’re all made into fucking neurotics before we run away screaming and finally escape.

But Jewish guilt mystifies me. Can anyone fill me in?

2

Your mother is perfect, and compared to her, your wife utter filth. She is rotten to the core, and to remedy this, I must visit and call my mother on a regular basis.

3

I once said in passing to a pretty religious Jewish friend of mine something about guilt being a destructive emotion. He disagreed: he said guilt was necessary in a civilized human society; that it served to keep people from repeating mistakes.

We didn’t get into a debate, but I disagree with that: he seems to be suggesting that “no guilt” = “sociopathic,” but I don’t think it’s that black and white at all.

4

Y’see, this is what I don’t get: You seem to be suggesting there’s a theological basis, and I suspect that myself. But I don’t know where it comes from. In Catholicism, given the scripture (Paul’s letters, esp.), plus sundry Catechisms, etc., the religious and theological basis for the guilt is patently obvious. I look at the Hebrew Bible, and while you do have plenty of Prophets railing against society for worhipping Baals and idols and so on, the extrapolation to everyday life isn’t as clear to me. Maybe there is just this ingrained idea that mistakes have consequences (a la the Prophets), but I can’t think of a faith that doesn’t espouse more or less the same.

5

I’m a nonobservant Jew who’s dated some Catholics (and some Muslims, for that matter) here and there, and believe me, there was no shortage of guilt in those family relationships, either. I haven’t exactly dated enough Catholics (or enough guys overall, for that matter) to have a statistical sample, but Jewish mothers don’t exactly have a monopoly on guilt. (Especially when their daughters are dating Catholics or Muslims.)

This is a huuuuge generalization, but Jews just a) have guilt about different things than Catholics (less often about sex, and more often about their mothers), and b) have done a more thorough job of creating commonly understood self-deprecating humor.

6

I once heard a Jewish woman’s radio commentary bemoaning about how much of a "Jewish mother’ her mom had been, how she had vowed that she would never be such a “Jewish mother”, and how she had become one. It went on though about how she was talking to an Indian mother, and an Italian mother, and so on, and that all mothers were “Jewish mothers” - worrying, playing the guilt card, etc. That’s what mothers do.

Jews got the stereotype for one reason: all those early Jewish comics of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s looking for material and mining their immigrant parents. It became the stock joke, the stereotype to play up and to. And as self-defacing self-stereotyping humor went, it was/is pretty benign. But watch almost any comedy with an ethnic slant (“My Big Fat Greek …”, “Bend It Like …”, etc) and you’ll see the same characteristics parodied. Don’t WASP moms guilt trip their kids?

How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? None. Don’t worry about me, I’ll sit here in the dark.

What, a Jewish boychick should make fun of a Hindi mother’s manipulations? :slight_smile:

7

I haven’t seen BFGW, but I did see “Beckham”. Yeah, there was a kind of ethnically stereotypical guilt thing going there, but it seemed to me to be an “old country vs. new country” thing. Y’know, nice Sikh girl should marry nice Sikh boy with lots of money and raise nice Sikh kids in a traditional home, etc. So instead she wants to play football and has the hots for an Irish guy, and that causes problems. Well, yeah, sure, take anyone of any ethnicity, emigrate them someplace sufficiently foreign, and watch them assimilate. Generational and cultural problems will abound.

It always seems, in the stereotypical Borscht belt style characterization, though, the guilt is more day-to-day and endemic. It’s like the “Jewish Mother” joke DSeid recited above. Sure, all cultures and religions have their own brand of guilt (and don’t I know it), and it certainly rears its head in the ugliest fashion when it comes to kids marrying/dating “outside of the faith”. But agian, the Jewish guilt stereotype always seemed kind of unique. Certainly, less about sex, more about doing right by the parents, etc. But also more mundane. Like that Mel Brooks 2000 Year Old Man skit “Pop, come in out of the rain!” “No, no, I’ll just stand here, catching pneumonia.”

Is it all just post-Vaudvillian Borscht-belt schtick? Or is this tapping into a real phenomenon. If the latter, whence cometh?

8

I’m going to make a far-out guess.

Jews are often in a minority, and often persecuted. Even without persecution, Jews end up as outsiders in a predominantly Christian society. That leads to an increased emphasis on family and stick-togetherness, which leads to increased familial guilt.

How’m I doin’?

Julie (product of a Catholic family=Guilt: not just for breakfast anymore)

9

Honestly Loopy, I think that it is mainly the shtick. Which isn’t to say that Eva doesn’t have a point too: different guilt. We haven’t been reared thinking that sex is a sin, (just something our wives don’t want to do once married … and no those jokes are likely just stereotypes too: what does the Jewish wife say at orgasm? Beige, I’ll paint the ceiling beige.) Sex is good in traditional Judaism. It’s a mitzvah to have sex on Shabbat in particular. True, our guilt is not the original sin stuff, we do not believe that we are intrinisically bad, we do not have the Christian institutional guilt, so we are left with our mothers to blame.

lissner,
I agree with your freind. Guilt is our superego, the internalized norms of society and family keeping our ids from spinning out of control. Not a destructive force but the basis of cooperative society.

10

Yeah, the mother seems to go in for the hardest knocks, as perhaps the great wellspring of the guilt tradition. I mean, the jokes are just endless…

A Jewish man calls his mother. “Ma, how are you?” he says.
“Not so good,” she replies.
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“I haven’t eaten in 30 days.”
“What? Ma, why haven’t you eaten for so long?”
“Because I didn’t want my mouth to be full in case you should call.”

So, is mame getting a bum rap, then?

11

Another Jewish boy checking in here. Definitely, Jewish guilt is different than Catholic guilt. It is not religiously-based and not focussed on sin…and “thou shalt not”. It is much more focussed on interpersonal stuff.

Actually, a good Jewish mother story was one time when I was home from college and stayed out very late. My mom told me the next day that she didn’t want to restrict me in any way but she just wanted to me to know when it is she starts to worry…“If it gets to be 1:30 or 2 in the morning and you are still not home, I begin to worry you were in a car accident or something.”

And, another Jewish mother joke: A mother sends her son two ties for his birthday. The next time he goes to eat dinner at his mother’s, he is very careful to make sure to wear one of them. When he comes in the door, she looks at him and exclaims, “What’s wrong…You didn’t like the other one?”

12

It’s amazing. Catholic guilt says “Whatever I do, it isn’t good enough for God. I need Jesus to save me.”

Jewish guilt appears to say “Whatever I do, it isn’t good enough for my mother. I need to call her anyway.”

I suppose, just like with everybody else, Bubbie is your closest and greatest ally, with whom you conspire to raise your parents’ blood pressure to near-lethal highs.

13

I think the ‘Jewish guilt’ is more cultural than religious. (Does this stereotype exist outside of America? I don’t know.) To whatever extent, mothers are mothers wherever you are.

14

Not that it helps much, but maybe I should stick a few uninformed hypothesis in?

Firstly, there’s the traditional jewish drive for education. Every child has to be able to read by thirteen. Period. That’s translated, over time, to general family desires for higher education and white collar jobs.

Secondly, with the centuries of persecution, especially in the areas most American jews come from, Germany and the Baltic states, the families have a tradition of checking on each other nigh-constantly, to make sure everything’s all right.

And, of course, with the matriarchial tradition… The father works, the mother runs the household, it becomes the mother’s job to guilt people into learning, working, eating, and staying in touch.

15

Thirteen? In my family, it was “before kindergarten.”

16

Yes, of course, before kindegarden now, Eva. I’m talking about historical origins here.

My family’s what I somewhat jokingly call ‘extremely reform’, so I’m a bit fuzzy on chapter and verse, but I’m pretty sure that a jewish boy has to be able to read by his bar mitzvah. It’s one of the rules, you know? I’m not so sure about jewish girls and bat mizvahs.

This created, in the middle ages, a significantly higher literacy rate than the surrounding population. You can’t say that’s not a relative advantage.

17

Hmmm. Very interesting points that didn’t enter this goy’s mind at first.

On the one hand, you’ve got a drive to succeed, especially in intellectual persuits, because the faith dictates a high level of literacy to enter into adulthood, spiritually speaking.

On the other hand, you’ve got millennia of persecution.

I’m probably walking right into a hornets nest in which I will be stung repeatedly, but I’m not one to avoid controversy: Looking at this as a biologist, there’s an intriguing scenerio here. I’m not going to get into DNA, but I think memes may be relevant in this case, if you guy into the notion that “culture” can evolve like a big organism. So, you’ve got a trait: The religiously dictated need for education. This forces people to learn, which enhances intelligence and that can only be good for survivability. Couple that with an extremely adverse environment, and the drive to succeed may become significantly enhanced over generations because it improves survivability. That characteristic of the culture will be strongly selected for as long as the pressure is maintained.

Of course, as there is terrible selective pressure on the culture in general, this translates into a great deal of pressure on the individual. It would manifest, perhaps, in interpersonal relationships, especially parent-child relationships, as parents who push their offspring to succeed tend to produce offspring that prosper.

Thing is, the culture probably evolved a lot faster than the organisms it uses to replicate itself. In simple terms, pressure causes stress. In this case, the organism may be stressed optimally; in other words, stressed just enough to enhance performance without the overall effect of the stress being so deleterious that the organism cannot pass the stress on, because he/she is rendered incapacitated before reproductive age. This learned behavior is passed on generation to generation. And since the organism need evolve only so much to cope with the selective pressure, that doesn’t involve enjoyment, just performance.

What this feels like might be guilt: “If I don’t do well by my folks, I’m no good. And I’m always worried about this, because they never let up. I better make sure my kid becomes a cardiologist or I’ll never hear the end of it. We’ll be miserable, but less so than the alternative.”

I bet most “outsider” cultures go through this. Thing is, I’m not in the “outsider” culture. I was never made to feel especially guilty about certain things. My religion heaped a fair amount on me, but that’s a vestigial holdover, like an appendix, and once I cut it off, I found I didn’t need it. I’m not plagued by this guilt anymore, and I can’t understand why anyone would seek such misery out. But at one time, maybe that guilt conferrred a really strong survival advantage to my spiritual forbearers. It allowed the culture I inherited to flourish. Now that the pressure is off, we’ll probably become (or likely already are) fat, lazy underachievers, culturally speaking, waiting for the Next Big Thing ™ to come along and take it all away from us. But, if we’re particularly ill-endowed with a motivator, like guilt, we’ll be too happy and stupid to notice, and die with a big smile on our faces, never really knowing what we were capable of.

18

One thing that added a lot to the guilt stereotype, particularly in the comedy of the '20’s, '30’s, and '30’s, was also the guilt of many Jews in America leaving the traditions of previous generations in order to assimilate more quickly. Many immigrants had to deal with “If you don’t work on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Monday.” Many Jews separating with Jewish law and tradition created a lot of guilt.